Posted
by
timothy
on Friday May 25, 2012 @09:50PM
from the look-but-hardly-touch dept.

benfrog writes "Microsoft has decided to restrict Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, to producing only Metro-style applications. Those who would like to produce conventional desktop applications or command line -based applications are stuck with Visual Studio 2010 or buying the full version. Microsoft announced the Visual Studio 11 lineup last week."

Visual Studio is hardly the only development IDE on Windows. Yes, it is good, but you cannot really say that "free desktop software development dead in Windows 8" just because gasp, MS wants you to buy the new version. Hell, they even still offer Visual Studio 2010 for free!

So if you are crying about this, what about coming up with those open source IDE's?? I understand that they have never matched Visual Studio, but seriously. I even buy good web development IDE's to my OS X, like Coda 2 [panic.com]. Stop being a cheap-ass winer and pay for quality tools.

You know what this story actually tells? That even FOSS users don't like their IDE's. They want to use Visual Studio from Microsoft because frankly, it is much better than the open source alternatives.

Visual Studio 11 is an improvement in many ways over Visual Studio 2010. Its C++ compiler, for example, is a great deal more standards-compliant, especially with the new C++ 11 specification. It has powerful new optimization features, such as the ability to automatically use CPU features like SSE2 to accelerate mathematically intensive programs, and new language features to allow programs to be executed on the GPU. The new version of the C# language makes it easier to write programs that do their work on background threads and avoid making user interfaces unresponsive. The.NET Framework, updated to version 4.5, includes new capabilities for desktop applications, such as a ribbon control for Microsoft's WPF GUI framework.

Taken together, there are many new features in Visual Studio 11 that are relevant, interesting, and useful for desktop developers. Indeed, things like the new WPF capabilities are only useful for desktop developers.

If Microsoft is so bad then why the hell there isn't better open source versions of these things??

The problem here is the TV problem. Visual Studio 11 is free to use, but not free to produce. You're not the customer, you're the product that Microsoft is buying. And Microsoft wants you to produce metro applications, that drive demand for their new products (and phones/tablets), not drag users back to their previous products that people have already bought.

It's as simple as that.

Don't like being used ? Pay for what you need. It'll be a whole other story, even with the very same Microsoft products.

Btw: as a developer I thought I'd add that Visual Studio is a fast, usable and well-integrated IDE, it's also a very, very industrial one. It is much less elegant than most of the alternatives.

I find the decision very strange. The software that matters will still be developed for the desktop because big companies just buy Visual Studio (or more precisely have subscriptions). Trying to push Metro-style apps via students and hobbyists is in my opinion ridiculous. Also you get all the devs' rage and all the bad P.R. of Internet articles. If I saw any reason for them to do something evil, enslave the devs with their tools or push metro down our throats I would understand but this decision makes no sense to me in any way.

Basically, they are frightened by Apple's relative success in mobile computing devices. They previously had a strategy around tablet computing, and Windows 7 represented them addressing all the obvious tweaks to be applied to the desktop environment for tablet use case. That market still hasn't taken off, so they assume Metro and ARM are required.

Of course, I think WP7 lackluster performance in the phone space demonstrates that perceived value of Windows on ARM is not particularly compelling. They might still think that the large form factor tablets might be more competitive, but I don't see any reason to believe it. In tablet space, MS best hope is probably Medfield and Brazos based devices, bringing the massive set of MS compatibile applications.

Forcing Metro on Desktop users to the extent possible is probably also a strategy to effectively throw the desktop usability under the bus to force people to get used to the interface. The hope being if users end up using Metro UI every day, it would grow on them or at least they would tolerate and understand it, and consistency between Windows Phone and Windows desktop gives the phone product a boost.

All of which might be a reasonable strategy, except that the typical uses for a Windows desktop PC are totally different to the typical uses for a tablet or similar mobile device. One is for power and content creation, the other is for easy content consumption. They just happen to overlap in that both can involve a web browser some of the time.

If MS sticks to its guns and tries to force Metro on everyone, I think it really will be the end of them, at least in their current monolithic form. I don't think they can afford another Vista or another poor assault on the mobile space, and Windows 8 has the potential to be both at the same time.

However, it appears (from the fact that we're having this discussion at all) that Microsoft are indeed restricting the capabilities of their new generation of developer tools that go with Windows 8, so to that extent the answer to your question would be "yes".

Also, I'll mention here that the default presentation Microsoft chooses will probably have a big effect on a lot of users, even if there are technic

Not a fan of his personality but since Gates has left: XBox,.Net, Windows server ~3X gain in market share, dido database solutions. Dominant in most large corporations for email as well. They've done some good things, they've done some bad things like all companies. In pure business sense they are doing pretty good: http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/earning_yield#series=type:company,id:MSFT,calc:earning_yield&zoom=&startDate=6/30/2002&endDate=5/25/2012&format=real&recessions=false [ycharts.com] earnings yield went from ~1.75% to ~10% since 2002 (couldn't get a chart out to 2000 when Gates left) while they traded ~flat since the dot com boom. So MS today has the earnings to back up the valuation versus MS of Gates day. They might have boggled the phone, screwed the pouch with Vista etc but they earn money, at least now. Consumer software isn't the only source of revenue.

I think CEOs that need to be crapped on are the ones that gave them selves bonuses when they were getting government bailouts and losing money. Or the second they got out of government ownership decide to reward themselves with 10's of millions as deferred payment for all those hard years of ~1M/yr salaries.

Keep in mind that Gates is still chairman of the board, and was still effectively directing strategy as chief software architect in 2006. That means he was still there overseeing things including the launch of XBox360 and.Net. I don't know where you source the gain in market share to discern what timeline you *think* Ballmer was responsible for. Effectively, up until ~2007 Ballmer had training wheels on.

MS offerings actually haven't signiicantly changed since Vista, which was released very shortly after

"Not a fan of his personality but since Gates has left: XBox,.Net, Windows server ~3X gain in market share, dido database solutions."

This isn't because of some magical action, but because Ballmer left them alone to go down the path Gates had already set them on. Effectively all Ballmer had to do was recognise these segments were growing and leave the teams the fuck alone to keep growing them - even a CEO as shit as him can manage that.

The key issue is that under Ballmer no new product lines have arisen and been succesful. Just about every succesful product line Microsoft has now, stems from the Gates era. There have been a number of new high growth markets - portable media players, tablets, cell phones, and in every case, Ballmer has failed to grasp them and form a cohesive and succesful strategy around them. Even the web he's struggled with, I've never heard of anyone using Office 365, but I know plenty of people that use Google Apps for example. Their closest thing to success there has been Bing which basically just had an absolute fuckton of money thrown at it in terms of getting it as a default browser, and shit loads of advertising until it actually got to a slightly better than negligible market share.

I don't disagree that Microsoft is still doing well as a business, but the point is it's basically on cruise control and that only works until you run out of gas. The world of computing is changing, it's become, and becoming more and more web and mobile based, but Microsoft isn't managing to follow - it's profits still come almost entirely from the desktop and server markets.

This is why Ballmer is an abysmal failure of a CEO, because all he's achieved at Microsoft is to keep it on the same path it's been for the last 10 years, which sure, means that it's growing whilst that path remains viable, but what about when that path stops being viable? what if something comes along and eats into that path? What if say, Apple decides it is willing to start shipping and supporting Mac OS X for PCs and an office suite now that they have more than enough money to pursue that kind of venture? We know Jobs wouldn't have allowed it, but the new Apple, where Cook gives shareholders more of a say? What then for Microsoft? Their bottom line is under threat and they have nowhere else to run to.

The fact is that Gates built a company so big, strong, and powerful that even the worst CEO in the world would take a few decades to really kill it off. You only have to look at Sony for another example of this - it's only just now really beginning to start having to explain it's failings, despite having been run fairly incompetently for at least a decade, getting on for two. Sony's looking right now like it may well end up fading into the history books with it's continued decline, but it's taken along time, and it'll probably take at least another decade yet to truly falter, that's assuming they don't get their act together and bring in competent management in the meantime.

You sir should be modded up to 11 because you nailed it, I would just add that not only did he not grow but he actually shot his own company in the face with a key piece of tech he killed and that was PlaysFor Sure or PFS.

At the time he got the bug in his ass to be "squirting" with his Zune PFS was a VERY popular program with a ton of licensees, all bring in money to MSFT and at the same time giving people a reason to use Windows and MSFT software for music. with PFS there was a ton of "all you can eat" sit

I'm sorry AC but you are full of shit. NOBODY is gonna want to do serious work like photoshop or quickbooks or a bazillion other jobs on no damned iPad. what you and all those that worship the Cult of Steve seem to be missing is the big picture which i will now give to you..

The VAST majority of the PCs that were made in the last 5 to 7 years are not only "good enough" for the jobs people have, for most they are INSANELY over powered. The reason why all the OEMs like HP and Dell are shitting on themselves is frankly they got waaaay too fucking spoiled and thought the MHz wars were just gonna last forever, but those of us in the trenches could have told you when the first dual cores starting hitting mainstream that the gravy train was over. there just isn't any real "killer apps" that require the insane power of a hexa or octocore PC, most people with duals aren't even really stressing the system. I gave my GF a triple core Athlon for Xmas to replace her aging P4. Now this is probably considered dog slow by this group but after a month I checked her stats and you know what? The thing hadn't even hit 45% load. the kind of tasks that she and most consumers have simply aren't stressing the systems they have, so why buy a new one when they won't feel a difference?

So I'm sorry but for a few jobs iPads work, for the rest they are but a toy. Apple sells on brand like Prada and Nike, just ask those people standing in line for a new one "does the one you have not work? Is there something wrong with it?" and the answer is no, its just COOLER to have the newest one. its a status thing, nothing more.

The reason MSFT and the OEMs can't do this is frankly nobody gives a rat's ass about Windows or these OEMs as a brand, the ONLY thing they want a Windows PC for is to run their third party apps....which frankly aren't even stressing what they have. I have built e350 units for office workers, that is probably the weakest chip made that is out of order. do they complain? Is it slowing them down? Nope because for basic office jobs frankly ANY dual core gives them cycles to spare.

so ultimately X86 is simply a victim of its own success. they made chips so damned powerful that honestly nobody bothers to replace one until it dies and with just a tiny bit of care even that netbook or laptop can last 5 years or more. the OEMs thought they could just follow the same path and keep cashing the checks, they were wrong. ARM is currently undergoing its own MHz war but when that peters out i have NO doubt you'll see the exact same thing you see now in X86, incredibly overpowered devices that aren't replaced until the previous one fails. Except for Apple of course, because owning last year's iPad is like wearing last year's designer fashions, its just not hip.

I'm sorry AC but you are full of shit. NOBODY is gonna want to do serious work like photoshop or quickbooks or a bazillion other jobs on no damned iPad. what you and all those that worship the Cult of Steve seem to be missing is the big picture which i will now give to you..

You use words like "nobody", when you know that's an outright lie. Adobe sells a version of Photoshop on the iPad. There are plenty of personal financial apps on the iPad (including over a dozen apps from Intuit!).

As usual, hairyfeet, you're demonstrating just how woefully out of touch you are with reality. People don't buy iPads because they are stupid fashion cultists. They buy iPads because they *like* iPads! But since you don't sell iPads, and don't like them yourself, anyone who buys them must be stupid, cult followers, and fashionistas, right?

What reason does the non-professional user have, today, to not buy an iPad? Because it doesn't run Photoshop as capably as a PC, today? Because it doesn't run CAD software as capably as a PC, today? Because it doesn't run financial software as capably as a PC, today? For the 1% of people who actually need that sort of capability, *today* they need a PC. Good for them! But what about the other 99%? There are plenty of photo editors (including iPhoto, which is fantastic, and a version of Photoshop which is surprisingly capable), personal financial software, and CAD software (including software from Autodesk). Not quite as capable *today* as the PC versions, but over time those differences will diminish, as they have over the past 2+ years.

I don't think the PC is going away any time soon, but it's definitely becoming less and less necessary to more and more people year after year. I have no idea where the balance is going to eventually end up at, but I am quite certain that, already today, the iPad is more capable and the PC is less necessary than you seem to grasp, and that those trends are growing, not slowing.

The reason MSFT and the OEMs can't do this is frankly nobody gives a rat's ass about Windows or these OEMs as a brand, the ONLY thing they want a Windows PC for is to run their third party apps....

Exactly! They don't want the PC OS or PC hardware because they specifically want the PC OS or PC hardware, they simply want the capabilities that the PC OS and PC hardware enables. The iPad enables a significant portion of those capabilities, but without all the bullshit hassle that accompanies the PC OS and PC hardware.. That's why they like iPads. Not because they are stupid fashion cultists!

so ultimately X86 is simply a victim of its own success. they made chips so damned powerful that honestly nobody bothers to replace one until it dies and with just a tiny bit of care even that netbook or laptop can last 5 years or more.

Right... The problem with PCs is that they are so damned good, nobody buys them! Fucking brilliant! And the reason the iPad is selling so well? Because it's complete shit! Your logic is amazing, hairyfeet.

People buy iPads because they like them. You can't seem to understand this, so you make up a completely nonsensical theory about how people are simply dropping $500-$800+ on something they don't like, but which is simply some sort of fashion statement (even though people don't do that for *anything* else in the sort of numbers you see for the iPad).

You run a business by going after the stingiest of clients. You push netbooks onto them, going after the cheapskates who will buy the shittiest PC money can buy (the $300 netbook), then marvel when they don't come back year after year for upgrades? Yet somehow, this is because the PC is just too damned amazing!

Have you considered that you are going after the worst type of customer? The one who will spend the least amount of money possible? How can you be surprised that they don't buy new hardware very often? And for those who you are providing a disservice to by pushing

The reason MS Home Server no longer exists is frankly nobody bought it and it didn't do Citrix style remote desktops anyway. Also you seem to think that the network can replace the PC when in most places, hell even a lot of colleges, the amount of bandwidth that would require would cost more than the machines to roll out.

But if you don't need the cycles the nice thing about X86 is that you can save money while still having a full desktop. I paid about $350 for my EEE PC AMD with 8Gb of RAM, it only uses 18

You have a point, as long as PCs' prices don't rise too much. I still have a few things to say:

they will always need to have a way for developers to create for iOS. For this reason, if no other (and I do believe there are many other reasons), Macs will always be around

Apple could phase out the MacBook Air in favor of some sort of maxiPad or iBook or something running iOS. The rumored TV with a built-in Apple TV might replace the iMac. Eventually, all iOS application developers would have to buy a Mac Pro, just as all developers for video game consoles have to buy a specific device.

But why? Why would Apple phase out proper Macs (except for the Mac Pro) in the near term? People are buying them in record numbers. The only reason Apple would replace them with iOS "Macs" would be if they think even more people would buy those instead.

At this point, it's not going to happen. Those that want iOS "PCs" can buy iPads, and far too many people still want and need proper PCs for Apple to phase out their PCs. It makes no sense today, on in the near future, for Apple to turn into the console model

You do realize why so much of the corporet segment is XP and IE6 right? It's because it's 'good enough'. Change for the sake of change is expensive. Vista started a wave of migration work, many aborted projects and feedback to MS from corporate customers on *why* they didn't want to deal with Vista. Much of the Windows 7 changes were driven by corporate requirements.

iPad's represent a far more drastic change than would iPad-centric model. The same holdouts for XP will not exactly be jumping at the cha

As a developer and, more important to me, as somebody who truly enjoys hacking all I can say is please have mercy and let the end be quick. If that's how it's going to be then just slit my wrists or better yet my throat.

Thankfully, Apple's continued quest for thinness uber alles will soon produce a macbook air thin enough to cut the vital blood vessel(s) of your choice with. Of course, the firmware will be cryptographically restricted to only support cutting those arteries that Ives sees as aesthetically pleasing; but so it goes...

Exactly. I might add that I live in a country that didn't go tits up a few years ago so while money was used to stimulate the economy their wasn't much of a bailout (other than a bit to the US autos since we make a lot of parts for them). I'm spiteful (not jealous because I want to be worth the money they earn not just earn it) that these performance incentives get given when the performance is good and when it is bad. That companies have interlocking board memberships effectively guaranteeing every year th

but that's 99% lazy, lazy programmers using the built in MS-SQL (which will bite them hard in the ass in a few years when in high cost of maintaining SQL DBs running over TCP/IP vs el-cheapo access DBs on network shares becomes apparent).

...I can think of all sorts of arguments for not using MS SQL that you could adopt for valid reasons, but I would have never dreamed I would hear someone advocating shitty access dbs on network shares as a replacement for a proper db.

I don't think it was an accident that XBox was good and cheap. Design decisions: commodity PC like hardware: oddles of people that already know how to code games for something like that, the hardware's commodity use in other areas give you volume effects you are unlikely to get with some odd "emotion engine" architecture etc. For XBox 360: HDDVD: bad guess, at the time no one knew which would win I don't think this is the reason why XBox 360 was cheaper, it was cheaper because it used relatively more mainst

I am an open source fan, but use Visual Studio at work. In my opinion Visual Studio is the best I have used for Windows only development. Now if you want to develop cross-platform its a whole different ballgame.

And is there any actual reason for why you would not pay for Visual Studio? Your "I guess it's time for some other compilers to step up!" even summarizes that you don't think that the other IDE's and compilers are not as good. You don't have any actual point apart from "I don't want to pay for the tools I use to get money".

And is there any actual reason for why you would not pay for Visual Studio?

You know that among modern OSes, Windows is unusual in that it doesn't come with a compiler as a standard feature.

You don't have any actual point apart from "I don't want to pay for the tools I use to get money".

If there's one thing Microsoft is smart about, it's that they try to please developers. People developing software that runs on Windows is good for Microsoft. It gives others a reason to want to use Windows. How many people are unable to fully switch to Linux (but would like to) because some software they must use is Windows-only?

This decision by Microsoft means that, up until now, Microsoft has considered such effects to be valuable enough to justify giving away Visual Studio. Now they are asking for money in addition to this effect. Complaining and trying to convince Microsoft to change their minds is standard haggling.

Besides which, not everyone who programs on Windows is selling the software they produce. Some of them are developing FOSS. They would naturally be more reluctant to pay than someone who is actually engaged in a commercial use and considers it a cost of doing business.

You know that among modern OSes, Windows is unusual in that it doesn't come with a compiler as a standard feature.

It's not quite so - it does come with compilers, just not with a C++ compiler. It does come with.NET (since Vista), and.NET runtime includes both C# and VB compilers, for the sake of runtime codegen (System.CodeDom).

VS Express does, though. While it doesn't come with project templates with desktop apps, nor the header files for Win32 stuff, the compiler is the real deal. So you could, in theory, take VS Express compiler and combine it with headers and libs from WinSDK, to get a complete command-line tool chain.

Or you could just install Qt SDK, which includes MinGW, Qt Creator, and Qt itself. All working out of the box with zero hassle.

(I never thought the day would come when I'd have to recommend QC over VS on Windows...)

You didn't get the point of my post. VS Express 11 is free, and it does include the compiler.

The problem is that it's not at all obvious how to marry that with Windows SDK (you can, but it's not exactly documented anywhere), and that the IDE itself doesn't provide support for non-Metro projects. But the compiler, you can have.

The Windows SDK won't ship with MSVC, but Visual Studio Express 11 still does. Visual Studio Express 11 still includes the full compiler toolkits and you're free to use those however you want as you could with the Windows SDK. But the IDE itself will only support creation of Metro-style projects.

You can (at least as the moment not sure when VS 2011 Win 8 ships) get the.net compiler for free. You can still code in.Net and compile it. An MSDN subscription might be useful but most things you can find out for free on the web, heck the framework docs are all up on the web for free too (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/618ayhy6%28v=vs.100%29 for example). Compiling.Net from the command line is no worse than doing a C build with gcc from the command line. Search a bit to figure out what you need

What open-source C/C++ compilers for Windows support the full range of APIs? Last I checked, MinGW had no support for Direct2D and DirectWrite, which are hardly obscure or brand-new. And MinGW also does not support structured exception handling.

I wonder, what do you really need SEH for? The exceptions that use it - like access violation, or division by zero - are not the kind of things that should be generated in the first place, and if they do, the best thing you can do is let the process crash right there and then, so that the crash dump has full context of what went wrong.

Direct2D and DirectWrite are a matter of producing the appropriate headers - it's all COM, so the compiler can handle it, you just need the corresponding declarations.

People here are "crying" because Microsoft has stopped providing an official way for building native Windows applications without paying money. This is the news. The fact that there might be alternate development environments (which will always lag behind the official ones, even if you pay 1E+9 $ for them) or that you could hack your way into compiling a native application by extracting some compiler binary from some other Microsoft product (legally?) is completely secondary. What we are discussing here is this clear decision from Microsoft, whether you see it as a "fault" or not.

It's not a problem for me at all. I've never bought Visual Studio (although I did use VS.NET under the MSAA program), and I would never use the crippled free versions of VS that MS concede me when I can use the excellent tools that are available to me as free software.

It could be a problem for those who believed that Microsoft and open source could be conjugated together, but this is another question.

Here it's not a matter of money, it's a matter of openness. The deprecation of Win32, the arrival of the Windows store, the bootloader lockdown, now the deprecation of the Windows SDK - the direction that Windows is taking is clear (and it converges towards the same trail that Apple are following with OSX and iOS - but at least they still give a full development kit with their OS).

There never has been compiler tools out of Windows. You don't even need to be old to remember this

And perhaps I'm so old that I'm starting to forget things then, because I seem to remember that the official way to build Windows binaries was the Platform SDK ( / Windows DDK), that you could get for free from Microsoft. The news today is that future versions of the SDK will no longer include a compiler.

As for alternatives, that's probably what will happen; people without MSDN access will just use GCC or Clang instead. However, given that the open source alternatives are far better supported under Linux or OS X, why write software for Windows? We're more likely to get new software projects targeting Linux, OS X or the mobile equivalents (Android/iOS) and ignoring Windows entirely. Alternatively, we get more web apps hosted on Linux servers that do not care about the type of client used. Either way, Microsoft and Windows users end up losing out on native software.

If Microsoft is so bad then why the hell there isn't better open source versions of these things??

Because Microsoft controls the APIs and can release new versions of Visual Studio simultaneously with the new releases of Windows? Because anybody who wants to do an open IDE for Windows has to wade through the craptastic Microsoft documentation to be a year behind the curve, right about time for the next set of API changes?

what about coming up with those open source IDE's?? I understand that they have never matched Visual Studio...

You know what this story actually tells? That even FOSS users don't like their IDE's. They want to use Visual Studio from Microsoft because frankly, it is much better than the open source alternatives.

...

If Microsoft is so bad then why the hell there isn't better open source versions of these things??

I have recently migrated off of Visual Studio, onto Qt Creator [qt-project.org] because Creator has matured to be clearly better than Studio.

Everyone has their own needs and preferences, I have copies of Studio, Eclipse and Creator on all of my machines at work and home - Eclipse is a necessary evil for some targets, but for the desktop, I was using Studio because it was the better environment - until the last six months or so.

I have recently migrated off of Visual Studio, onto Qt Creator [qt-project.org] because Creator has matured to be clearly better than Studio.

Can you (or anyone) give some clear examples on what you think is better about QT than VS? And don't say things like "the editor is clearly better" That doesn't really help me. What is features do you like that one has and the other doesn't?
I happen to like VS, the only other IDE I've used lately is xcode and it has some better autocompletion but otherwise I don't like it.

Don't forget that Nokia owns Qt (and Qt creator, etc), and they are now basically beholden to Microsoft. It is currently is a semi-symbiotic relationship, but there is plenty of past evidence to suggest that Nokia will eventually be forced to bend their knee to Microsoft.

True, however from the web site.

Qt Creator is available under GPL v3, LGPL v2 and a commercial license. i am quite sure even Microsoft would have a difficult time of forcing Nokia to stop making Qt freely available since the GPL does have teeth if the occasion arrises.

It's actually not just a matter of the IDE alone. For me it's the combination of the IDE and Qt itself. People often forget Qt is not just a GUI toolkit - it provides a wealth of classes to implement really nice integrated applications.

Let me give one example to clarify this: suppose you want to write an application which needs to interact with web content, say, a map (Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps for instance). You want GUI controls on the C++ side which interact with markers on the map, you want to in

1) That you haven't read the article. Not only is Microsoft dropping the free edition of Visual Studio, they're also dropping the compiler from Windows SDK, therefore forcing you to buy the paid version of Visual Studio or, some people are suggesting here, rip the compiler out of the "free" Metro version of Visual Studio (I'm assuming that they found some guarantee by Microsoft that they will always make this hack possible both technically and legally).
2) That you haven't ever used an open source IDE, as there are some which are perfectly competitive with Visual Studio (Netbeans, QT creator).

No. What it tells is that there are some FOSS developers that like Visual Studio, and they are now complaining loudly and publicly. The others are just not concerned and rightfully so. There is no basis for any quantitative evaluation.

Personally, I do not get the whole IDE thing. I started out with IDEs and tried new ones from time to time. I find them to stand in my way once I have a certain skill-level with the respective language. By now I believe IDEs are mainly a crutch for the semi-competent and do ac

You must not know many people, then. Since I started using test-driven development, I find I rarely turn to a debugger any more. Not that I ever used one much in the first place. In the early days, I found I was most likely to need a debugger when I started getting sloppy, so I tried to stop being sloppy, with reasonable success, and my use of a debugger dropped dramatically.

But it's partly a matter of style. Some people like to step through their code to make sure it's all doing what they expect. I f

Windows developers have almost the exact same problem as Android developers. There's exactly one officially-blessed IDE, and just about every book, blog, howto, and forum post assumes you're using it.

NBandroid is a noble project that many people work hard maintaining. Unfortunately, it gets zero love from Google, and as a result, support for the latest and greatest Android SDK tends to arrive about a month or two after one of its developers gets a new phone that uses it. Like Eclipse, it has some bugs. Truthfully, most of them are minor... IF you've completely mastered Netbeans, Eclipse, Android development, and the use of build scripts. Otherwise, it'll probably stop you dead in your tracks, with little hope of moving forward any time soon unless you throw in the towel, move everything over to Eclipse, and hope that the situation improves for your next Android project.

The story with Windows is more or less the same. If you have a problem building a C# program under VS10, you can find four hundred resources online to help troubleshoot it in 18 seconds with Google. Have a similar problem with something like SharpDevelop, Eclipse, Netbeans, or another non-VS IDE, and you'll probably be looking for the answer for quite a while.

It's even worse if your native language isn't English. Visual Studio is so pervasive worldwide, even people who speak regional languages can find abundant help in their own language. There might even be one or more entire BOOKS about Visual Studio in it. Deviate from Microsoft's chosen path, and you'd better be fluent in English. OK, I'm exaggerating a little... lots of the independent IDEs are written by authors in non-English-speaking countries, and provide support in their own language as well.

At one time, I would have been optimistic and said that Microsoft's future lack of free support might encourage more progress with free alternatives. Three years of Android development have disillusioned me. NBandroid has come a long way and made enormous amounts of progress, but thanks to Google's total contempt for Netbeans, it still ends up holding *me* back whenever I try using it, and there's no way in hell I could recommend it to somebody who's learning Android programming for the first time. And we're talking about a Java development ecosystem that has historically had only TWO viable free IDEs, both of which were widely viewed as the two best IDEs available, period. Compare that to Windows, where NONE of the alternatives has market share that would count as "sloppy seconds" compared to the overwhelming dominance of Visual Studio, and all of which have real drawbacks and disadvantages compared to Visual Studio.

At the end of the day, Visual Studio is kind of like a 97 year old benevolent dictator of a prosperous country who's been ruling since he was a teenager -- people might have complaints, especially if he starts getting senile in his old age... but he's been the only government anybody in that country has ever known, and not even his fiercest opponents can really see themselves taking his place, because over the past 80-odd years, he's basically become synonymous with the country, its government, and the cultural identity of the people who live there. With the possible exception of Commodore 64 BASIC, it's hard to think of any development environment that's been more dominant and pervasive within its platform than Visual Studio within its platform and era.

I imagine it has something to do with it being a user with a brand new account (first post was 3 days ago), who has posted overwhelmingly pro-MS, anti-Google posts, who posted a lengthy and well-formatted reply to this story the exact same minute as the original story was posted.

There has been a lot of this nonsense recently. I think most moderators have got into the habit of down-modding these just automatically.

Too many windows fanboys/paid flacs have Slashdot accounts these days and mod anything that has legit criticism of MS products down...I've been watching this happen for the past little while here...and I would not be suprised if many of the IP address of those moding down post that are critical of MS come from Microsoft campuses or those employed by MS.

Not quite; note the time of the article and the time of the first post. Yes, even beating out the first post trolls. Here, let me repeat that just to make sure it doesn't get lost in other sentences:

That post beat out the first post trolls.

We've had an infestation of not-at-all-subtle paid Microsoft shills with ready-made posts like that in here for a while, desperate to astroturf wherever they can. The mods are going to downvote them to oblivion, simple as that. It's just that there's no "-1 Spam" or "-1 Shill" mod, so "-1 Troll" is the closest we've got.

The reason there's no "-1 Shill" mod is because there is absolutely no proof that these are paid posts, and it wouldn't matter if they were or not.This could just as easily be someone with a personal agenda, or a troll who loves reading reams of "you got paid to write that waaaaa" posts that inevitably follow a swiftly written, pro-Microsoft post. And yes, there is a "-1 Spam". If you think the point has been made too many times before, use "-1 Redundant".

What you're really asking for, is "-1 Inconvenient to my View of the World", which is not going to happen. I suggest people, including you, stick to answering the posts for their content and not for their source. In the end, it doesn't matter if they're paid for or not - if the post is inaccurate, refute it. If you disagree, argue. Don't, however, cry about that fact that a post you don't like ended up higher than yours. It doesn't come across as reasonable discussion, it comes across as complaining for the sake of it.

I use emacs for 99% of my stuff, and I have to say, while it's a great editor, I wish I had IDE-level code browsing abilities (and to a lesser extent, intellisense-style stuff). I'd kill someone for good "go to definition" support. Ctags-style stuff is a shitty substitute, at least on our code base, and I've never really been able to get the fancier stuff to work well. VS isn't perfect there either, but it's still a lot better...

Could you explain this a little more? It seems to me that "go to definition" is a rather basic thing for any IDE and since CTAGS' primary job is exactly that, I don't understand why it would not work so well on your particular code. I mean, all it has to do is understand the difference between a definition and not a definition (i.e. it doesn't need to fully understand the code), so if it is having trouble doing that job it certainly reflects poorly on the tool.

I guess I'm just curious what sort of code or code layout would cause it problems.

(I'm the grandparent who praised Emacs.) Did you ever use TAGS and C++?
It works well for "go to definition" in C, but C doesn't have function overloading.
If your code has a a dozen classes and two class templates which contain foo(), how can TAGS
know which one you mean when you say "go to definition of bar->foo()"?

I agree this sucks. Fortunately decent C++ code is more structured than C, so I can normally
find my way around the code base without TAGS. But it's still embarassing.

Of course there are other IDEs, for which I and others will be grateful. The point is that Microsoft went from mildly sane to Full Retard in the span of one OS release. VS 2010 Express (especially when combined with a Platform SDK) was quite useful for making what they now call "classic apps". Now we have to pay in, or sanction M(isadv)e(n)tro.

Visual Studio has been paid product for most its lifetime. The few recent versions had the free "express" edition mostly suited towards students and new programmers. No one that actually does serious development work uses it - it's just there to try things out, just like demo versions of games. Yet, they still offer free version to make Metro apps - again useful for new programmers. But if you do serious work, you will get the full version, just like you always have.

Express editions were also very useful for F/OSS folk who often do development primarily on Linux (or, these days, also OS X), but want a Windows port - VC++ 2010 Express is full featured enough to compile anything you throw at it, and to create project files and other similar stuff to publish for others (the "serious work" guys with VS Ultimate who want to use that F/OSS library) to easily integrate into their project.

This isn't a dumb decision at all. It's the consequence of a dumb decision. VS Express was put out to get people to switch to.NET development. Now that they're trying to shift from.NET to WinRT or whatever it's called this week, the tools aren't needed any more but the WinRT versions are. Look further down the stack and this change makes sense in a Microsoft way.

Your comment would make more sense if you'd realize that WinRT does not subsume.NET - indeed,.NET is one of the three frameworks/toolchains available to target WinRT (the other two being C++ and HTML5/JS).

Actually, it's more like a synthesis of old and new. For example, take Silverlight - the new XAML-based UI framework to Metro is pretty much it, except rewritten in native code - but, thanks to WinRT language projection magic, still accessible from.NET as if it were managed. For simple Silverlight apps, you can often get away literally with just renaming a bunch of namespaces in your "using" statements, the rest just works. On the other hand, now you can also use it from C++ (also with XAML, data bindings

No matter how you read this, the headline is completely misleading. There are other compilers/IDEs for Windows that cost $0. And the term "free" can mean two things on Slashdot; this headline makes it sound like Microsoft is trying to kill FOSS.

Which is exactly what they've been doing during all their history. FOSS developers can either be aware of this, stay away from them and be happy, or they can trust them every time they promise again that they've changed, that now they've embraced openness etc., and then get screwed by them once again when they show their true nature with moves such as this one.

It seems like with this move and generally the Metro and Windows 8 walled garden stuff, Microsoft is going more and more "the Apple way". Is it really in their best interest? Is it just me, or hasn't the open-ish (compared to Apple) Intel + Microsoft Windows ecosystem served a desktop market niche that is different from the Apple universe? Does Microsoft have an exit strategy in case they fail in closer competition with Apple at Apple's game?

It seems like with this move and generally the Metro and Windows 8 walled garden stuff, Microsoft is going more and more "the Apple way". Is it really in their best interest? Is it just me, or hasn't the open-ish (compared to Apple) Intel + Microsoft Windows ecosystem served a desktop market niche that is different from the Apple universe? Does Microsoft have an exit strategy in case they fail in closer competition with Apple at Apple's game?

I wish I had mod points today....

This nails the point EXACTLY.

Microsoft is in such a rush to try and capture their own share of the mobile market and stay relevant, they are dumping 30 years of solid R&D in desktop user interfaces for an unintuitive tablet-centric UI, and in an effort to drive developers into the walled garden, they are now enforcing Metro development with their free tools.

The short-sighted idiots driving this nonsense at Microsoft are forsaking the desktop world with this move, though. As bad as we thought Vista was, it still sold well enough (tied to new systems) - but the user furor over Windows 8 will make the Vista flap seem like a blip in comparison. It's a wrong-headed approach to try and shove the genie back into the bottle, Microsoft... and worse, trying to do it by creating a hybrid UI that does no specific job particularly well for users of either environment. Compromises that sacrifice millions of dollars of very good research into user interfaces will end up costing you far more in the long run.....and if consumers will be rebelling against Windows 8, what do you think will happen in the enterprise world? It's just starting to deploy Windows 7 desktops, warily approaching it after the nightmare that was Vista. Windows 8 demands retraining that will cost some organizations MILLIONS to implement. The introduction of Metro will also likely introduce a whole new firestorm of exploits for IT admins to face.

Congrats, Microsoft, for turning into a dumbass company overnight.

Do yourselves a big favor, Microsoft.... dump everybody in the company who thought Win8 Metro was a good decision for the desktop. FIRE THEM, and scrap the launch before it's too late. Pretend it never happened and begin working on Win9 with a Start Button and the improvements users WANT (like a new file system, for example, DLNA that works, improved stability and app fault recovery), instead of forcing limitations and touchscreen UIs down their throats.

"The new Windows compilers and CRT for the x86, x64, and Itanium (IA64) operating systems are included in the Windows SDK and integrated into its command-line build environment. These compilers and CRT are the same as those that are included in Visual Studio 2010."

According to their own feature page, the compilers are included in the SDK./Have MSDN Sub, but won't be worrying about Win8 development for

Microsoft is so consumed with "Apple envy" that they seem to have forgotten what their bread and butter is: the business desktop. They are so obsessed with being a competitor in the tablet market that they are making a product that actively hurts their core demographic.

Why do people use Windows? Legacy support is a BIG reason – and yet Microsoft under Ballmer seems dedicated to trying to kill it as quickly as possible. Guess what? If legacy support goes away, so does a large part of the reason for people not switching to another OS! After all, if they have to rewrite everything anyway... Ballmer once understood that "developers, developers, developers" were what made Microsoft's platform dominate; now he seems to be going for tablet/smartphone-using hipsters and tweens, and giving developers the middle finger.

A lot of people still use laptops and desktops. Microsoft is throwing away that market to be in also ran far behind iPhone and Android. Microsoft should focus on doing what they do best. Instead they are scaring Windows customers and Windows developers into leaving the PC platform. Poorly played, Microsoft.

Even if older versions of Visual Studio can be used, they are notorious for breaking under new OSs. VS2003 won't work on Vista or Windows 7. VS2005/2008 is slower, and VS2010 doesn't support global directories so you must enter your search paths manually into every single library, making porting time consuming and tedious. What Microsoft are doing here is saying if you don't want to develop METRO apps, then it's time to leave the Windows platform.

In addition, the desktop is likely to be the high profit margin market in the future. CAD/CAE, publishing, software development graphic design, etc, and most office work will still need large screens. The mobile market could easily turn into a race to the bottom. I'm surprised that MS wants to be there.

For C++ development, ease of use, portability and tools, Qt Creator is both a lightweight and feature packed IDE. It has about the same feature set as Visual Studio and similar usage, plus it's much easier to use and configure for custom build systems. It can be used with both MSVC compiler and Mingw. It's well mantained and has some killer features such as the locator. As a plus, it works identically everywhere, so I can get my favorite development environment no matter if i'm at work (Windows), at home (Linux) or on my laptop (OSX).
In my view, the biggest problem it has is it's name, "Qt-Creator", which i wish developers would change. Even if Qt is hands down the best library and toolit i've ever used for mobile and desktop development, it works perfectly fine for non Qt related development too, so plenty of developers writing non-Qt are missing the best opensource C++ IDE.

The Qt SDK has an option to be used with LGPL v 2.1 [nokia.com] which will allow developers to release proprietary executables without being required to release their source code. Source release is only required if the developers make changes to the Qt SDK itself, which usually shouldn't be an issue. There's also a commercial license [digia.com] available if even this is too onerous.

The LAMP stack has improved if it can build Windows desktop apps. They haven't talked about VWD, just the desktop targeted tools like the express versions of C# and VB. Funny thing is that they're targeting Metro and that's moving to HTML/JS.